Community Gardens of the Future

The club began inside a tenant organizing effort. The landlord is Alma Realty, which she calls famously neglectful. The buildings had many problems, and turnover during COVID had splintered an earlier organizing effort. She could not get people into the same room. The empty tree beds out front did it. People wanted to work on something together. She treated the gardening as a side project to teach neighbors to work together for the organizing. It became its own thing, separate from the work inside the complex, though not cut off from it.

The club actively stewards forty street trees. Twelve or thirteen of those beds are now established native pollinator gardens, a corridor along the sidewalk. She distrusts before-and-after photos, because the in-between and the after-after are what matter. One bed sits in front of a community fridge on Classon Avenue. People come every day to get food for their families. The bed used to hold dead rats. Caring for it tells the people at the fridge that their neighbors care for them. It gives people a sense of ownership over public space.

A community garden could have brought neighbors together too. She chose the tree beds for how local they are. People work directly in front of where they live, often with people from their own building. Community gardens vary in access, for good reasons. Some keep hours. Some ask newcomers to ease into membership. A tree bed has no barrier. It belongs to NYC Parks, which encourages people to garden in it. That openness also means the beds get abused. She compares the work to a Zen sand garden: rake it, it gets messed up, rake it again.

For her the future is public space people do not yet think of as theirs. Gardens get better when people stop feeling they must be members or hold an official stake. Anywhere there is dirt can be a garden. New Yorkers say they wish they had outdoor space. She tells them they have it. They get to share it. She does not recommend growing food in a tree bed. She grows plants other species eat. The change she wants is in the relationship to land in a city. People are part of the land and its stewards, not residents on top of it.

When he started, GreenThumb had fifteen or twenty staff. It now has about fifty. Back then, he says, most gardeners would have called it unresponsive. It asked for paperwork and never followed up. It ran the odd workshop and handed out materials when it could. Over ten years it has staffed up and become more responsive. It now helps garden groups through conflicts and handovers. It runs programs that bring new and younger people into the gardens.

The hardest thing about New York's community gardens, he says, is that small groups have run them for a very long time. His focus is programming for people who do not already know the gardens: a low-risk way to walk in. Volunteer events are the first step into a garden. Public events like the Harvest Fair are the fun one. Younger people matter because every garden is run by volunteers. The staff is small. GreenThumb could not open 560 gardens to the public and keep them maintained. What excites him is more people knowing the gardens exist and using their local one as a public space.

He does not think the gardens of the future look much different from today's. What should change is how open they are. He wants them more active, with more people using them. They are among the few free places in New York where you can go without doing anything but hanging out. Parks are the others. Unlike a park, a community garden is run by people from its own neighborhood, so gardens look wildly different across the city. Many Bed-Stuy gardens focus on growing food. The East Village gardens he worked with early on mostly grow community, with events, performances and room for people to show their talents.

Asked who owns the gardens, he says about 330 of the roughly 560 are now Parks property, and the number has grown over the years. Organizing in the nineties saved many gardens in several ways. The rest sit on land held by other city agencies, which GreenThumb has relationships with but which do not want to transfer it to Parks. Or they belong to one of the handful of land trusts in the city that own community gardens.

She picks up Reuter's point about bringing people in and names what he left out: access. It is a huge problem in the gardens, she says, mainly because of stakeholders like her. They built the movement from day one and hold a hardcore sense of ownership. She repeats an old line that veteran community gardeners are nasty, and says it is true. It comes from everything they went through to create the movement. As she tells it, sustainability and climate work began in community gardens. The gardeners wrote the blueprint.

The agency has leveled up, she says. It responds more, and gardens get a lot of resources from it. But the relationship runs both ways. GreenThumb was built on the work gardeners did in the early days. So gardeners are partners, not supplicants. They walk in with a handshake, not on their knees. They want the agency to succeed, because if it falls, they fall. They also work with Green Guerillas and GrowNYC. When GreenThumb has no money for something, GrowNYC has often stepped in.

She found her first garden as a vacant lot around the corner. She assumed it was private. It turned out not to be. Establishing it meant walking the street and asking every person, every bodega and every store for support. They said yes in concept and did not help physically. All four of her gardens were founded by women of a certain age, all fully employed. She was working full time when she started both of hers. The neighborhood came round slowly. In 2015 the city came back for Tranquility Farm, though it was licensed and established. The gardeners refused and fought. Neighbors wrote letters, called and showed up to everything. Children came too. That, for her, is the core of community.

Every garden in New York City started on city land, she says, most of it under HPD. The city is the biggest landlord. Most gardeners do not know that. Gardeners cannot approach HPD themselves. GreenThumb, as a sister agency, can, and it does so on their behalf. Edie Stone, a former director of GreenThumb, got Tranquility Farm a temporary license. Eminent domain can still override anything. But once the GreenThumb leaf is on the fence, she says, the garden is saved. Some gardens were bought outright because the city could not afford them, and she wants that credited. Bette Midler's New York Restoration Project bought gardens. So did the Trust for Public Land, which set up land trusts in Brooklyn and Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx to run them.

There is no technology and no magic in gardening, she says. It is good soil, earth not dirt, plants and water. She hopes younger people will take up agriculture as a science and a practice, whatever else they do. Learn the name of a plant, its origin and its Latin name, because you cannot care for a plant you cannot name. Then she turns to GreenThumb's metal beds. Her garden's soil had to be tested for contamination first. People from Cornell walked the land and told them to grow in raised beds, not in the ground. Now the beds come in aluminum. No argument convinces her. She rejects the case that aluminum lasts twenty years and wood ten. Nothing lasts forever, she says. The root is capitalism. She asks the agency to lead on sustainability and find another way. MacDonald turns it into the evening's first action item: tell Reuter, no aluminum beds.